Don't worry about building speed. Worry about making relaxation and economical motions habit. The secret to speed is small, relaxed movements.

As for breaking out of the pentatonic box, I'd recommend learning some basic theory. Learn your major and minor scales, especially how to construct them and which intervals are most consonant and dissonant (which will factor into how you phrase things).

The most important aspect of writing and playing solos, in my mind, is to learn to listen analytically to the music you're hearing. Basically, you want to be able to listen to a passage, envision a melodic line on top of it, and then reproduce that melodic line. Start trying to pay more attention to what you're playing when in a passage and how those notes interact with the ones around them.

Basically, you want to be able to listen to a passage, envision a melodic line on top of it, and then reproduce that melodic line. Start trying to pay more attention to what you're playing when in a passage and how those notes interact with the ones around them.

+1 Nice, Geldin!

One ways I used to do this is:
listen to my backing progression and the "window of time" I am trying to fill, I loop it, and then I Sing different melodic lines until I have one that sounds cool - Then I figure out how to play it on guitar (adding in embelishment techniques for color/texture like unison bends, octave intervalling, slides, etc)

Eventually as you get more experienced, you will learn how to "Sing" directly through your guitar without this extra vocal step. But using your voice just takes all the technique out of the way and lets you focus on what Geldin said - Feeling!

One ways I used to do this is:
listen to my backing progression and the "window of time" I am trying to fill, I loop it, and then I Sing different melodic lines until I have one that sounds cool - Then I figure out how to play it on guitar (adding in embelishment techniques for color/texture like unison bends, octave intervalling, slides, etc)

Eventually as you get more experienced, you will learn how to "Sing" directly through your guitar without this extra vocal step.

This!

Also, if you want to be able to solo over the whole neck, I suggest learning a scale (start with the pentatonic scale, if you like) over the whole neck. You can then use each shape individually (there are 5 shapes) to solo ONLY in that shape.

That's a great exercise to get you used to different areas of the fretboard and different parts of each scale. You can then repeat this exercise with any other scale you learn.

For playing all over the neck, improvising with a scale on a single string seriously helped me out. Once you're comfortable moving up and down the neck while still being able to play cleanly and fluidly, add another string.

It's a pretty simple exercise, but it actually ended up helping me in a lot of other ways as well. It's improved my knowledge of the fret board, helped me to view scales outside of the typical box patterns, and improved my improvisation and playing in general.